Feral: Chapter 2

As I walked home, I kept a careful watch on my surroundings. I must have gotten complacent. After years of living in Jarvin, a city known for its hatred of hybrids, halflings, orcs, and combinations thereof, the few times I managed to get caught were always due to me simply not paying attention.

It was understandable. Today was supposed to be the same as any other. I’d only gone to the docks after all. It was a great place to pick up various reagents and tools after all. Since Jarvin’s harbor sat right along a river and the ocean routes to the Eastern Continents, one could pick up almost anything from the shops there. I’d done enough work there that, even with my orc blood, a few of the shopkeeps gave me fair price. No discounts, but they wouldn’t cheat me.

Still, I should have known better. All of Turab hated orcs.

There are many species in the world. Humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, dragons, bears, cougars, manticores, even spirits and demons count as their own species.

By far one of the most hated is orcs. A hatred that is apparently mutual. Living south in the Scown Deserts that border the continent, orcs are seen as monsters for good reason. They have been at seemingly endless war with the other races for centuries, killing, raping, and enslaving thousands. The other races have warred from time to time, for one reason or another. But there has been no race with as prevalent a hatred for the other species of Turab as the orcs.

There have been exceptions however, that may be the sign of a deeper reason for the hatred of the orcs. My father was a simple farmer. One day, an orc woman found him at his farmstead. And rather than killing him and devouring the flesh, which I’ve been told many times is how such things end, she asked to live with him. My father must not have heard how such things ended, because he agreed (I have heard from a friend of my father that my mother was apparently very beautiful, which may give a shallower reason for why he agreed).

Whatever the case, they fell in love. I was born. And then someone who wasn’t a friend found out.

If orcs are hated, then hybrids are seen as strange. But a half-human, half-orc child? Akin to summoning a demon and slaughtering a city.

They gathered a mob, and attacked the farmstead. My father gave me to his friend to take away. Then he gave my mother a sword, and picked up a hammer.

My father killed three men. My mother killed ten. My father’s friend liked to speak of my mother’s laughter as she killed men with ease, roaring with pride in her husband.

Small comfort. I still had no parents.

My father’s friend took me to Jarvin. The city may have a hatred for orcs, but the magistrate was the fairest man I’d ever heard of. At the very least, he had obsession with following the letter of the law, no matter what race the man it judged. As long as I kept my head down, never caused trouble, I’d be safe. So I’d lived in Jarvin, raised by my father’s friend.

My story isn’t that bad. There are others with worse lives. I’ve been lucky. I have food, an education, and a place to sleep. In the end, I’d long since decided that no matter how hated I was, I would continue my life as I saw fit. I would follow the law, defend myself as needed, and live my life to the fullest. My race does not define me as my actions do. I’d chosen to be the man I wanted to be, to live my live as best I could.

I messed up sometimes. And life was hard for a half-orc no matter how optimistic I was. But I tried. And that made my life worth living.

------

Sticking to the shadows was easy. I could see in the dark better than a human, and even with my large size, I’d gotten good at avoiding attention when I really tried. I avoided the marketplaces, took to the rooftops of one of Jarvin’s many schools to cut across a path, taking the time to gaze at the massive tower that stood in the distance as I went. Paranoid of me, but I wasn’t willing to risk getting in another fight. I’d take the exercise in a trade for less trouble.

Soon enough, I hopped off a low building to walk towards my house.

As I stepped into my home, I felt as though closing the door also meant shutting away the hateful world beyond. I try not to melodramatic about such things. My life is far better than most like me would hope for. I could have been working in prison mines, or sliced up into an experiment. Instead I was able to sleep in a comfortable bed, and learn things most wouldn’t dream of.

Still, as I slowly closed the wooden door of my home behind me, I sighed in relief. Home was small, no mansion. But compared to some places, this was a palace. The door opened to show the dining room, with a table and three chairs made of wood and a small fireplace where we cooked our food and warmed ourselves when necessary. A small shelf with cooking utensil, wooden bowls, and a small figurine of a bird I’d made in one of my first projects. A set of steps led up to the two small rooms where I and my master slept, and a hallway to the right of the stairs led to the back of the house, where most of the space was.

“Char,” said a gruff voice from the back. “That you?”

“Yes, one second,” I grabbed a cup and poured out a small smidge of water from a nearby barrel. The barrel was actually two, one stacked on another. Both were watertight. The top barrel was half-full of a layer of sand, ground charcoal, pebbles, then sand and charcoal again, with a thick cloth to allow water to drip through. I’d created it to make clean water, based on something I’d read, and I was rewarded for my efforts with a nice clear cup.

Having had my fill, I went into the back room. A blast of heat hit me as I passed the stairs. The actual backroom constantly had the smell of burning wood, chemicals, and raw metal. I breathed deeply, taking comfort in the smells. I followed up by taking a thick cloth from a rack next to the door and tying it around my neck. As comforting as the scents were, too much smoke inhalation could kill even a being with my constitution.

The actual workroom was the biggest room in the house. The top was made of tough timber, and had several large openings to let out smoke, as well letting the sunlight come into the room. The walls were made of thick stone, and the floor was stone as well. Four forges were placed around the room, leaving much of the space open for one to move around in. There were also little chambers for heat-treating the metals next to some of the forges, as well as barrels of oil and water for quenching. Two anvils, one massive and one a bit smaller, were at either end of the room.

It should be noted that everything was clean. The floors were swept, the barrels of oil and water were closed, and the tools put away nicely on racks. An unclean shop, especially one like ours, could prove fatal.

Another door across from me lead to another room, the place that had become my special section of the shop, set aside for my experiments.

Two men left that room. The first to leave it was a thin human wearing an apron. He was short man, with a long-sleeved shirt and a thick leather apron on to protect him. He was also clearly annoyed, his brown eyes blazing as his face twitched, a large beard shuffling with each furious grind of teeth.

“Um, Art?” he looked up at me when I spoke, then looked at the second man who entered. I looked as well.

The second man was tall, almost as tall as me, and built like dancer, with slim muscles revealed by his practical shirt and comfortable trousers that suggested quickness and balance. His bright blue eyes were set in a face that was uncomfortably good looking for a man. Of course, as his long ear that sharpened into points suggested, he was an elf, and I had yet to meet an elf that was not the pinnacle of beauty.

“Hasha,” I looked between the two men. “I didn’t realize you were going to be here so early.”

“Tell the damn elf,” Art said with a wide-eyed anger. “That he needs to mind his own business on how I run my shop!”

Hasha snorted. “I’m simply saying that if you would follow my system—”

“To hell with your system!” Art declared. “Damn it all, I let Char build his damn contraptions, and they even work! I admitted I like them! Stop changing everything else!”

I snorted, offended. My ‘contraptions’ were pretty damn good if I could say so myself.

“Art,” said the taller man. Though frustrated, Hasha seemed to be keep calm. “I am simply saying that, with a better flow to the shop, you will increase efficiency to your projects.”

I sighed, moving around the pair.

------

They would often fight like that. While both seemed to like each other well enough, they tended to butt heads on matters dealing with the shop. Art, as the owner, liked things to be as they were, as change might introduce and unknown element to the shop. Hasha, as a wizard, was always up-to-date on the newest ways of doing things, and always saw it as his role to bring Art to the present in all his ways.

They made an odd pair, the skinny blacksmith and the elf wizard. It was my fault that they had even met after all.

Arthur Maroon was the friend of my fathers that had saved me. Arthur brought me to Jarvin afterwards, and raised me. While he didn’t know much about kids, especially infant half-orcs, he’d put his full effort into it. I’ll always love him for that.

As I grew up, he started teaching me everything he knew about blacksmithing. The art of shaping metal had become by first real lessons in the world, and one I treasured until now. My fondest memories took place in the blacksmithing shop, rather than the small home we lived in. He was a good man, if a bit rude at times. It was partially thanks to him that I’d become the man I was. He’d introduced me to Jennifer, and allowed Hasha into the house when the wizard came calling.

Called ‘those of the wise’, wizards were the premier researchers of the natural and unnatural world. They studied the physical and spiritual magic’s of the world. In truth, ‘wizard’ was a catch all term. A man who used magic to heal others might call himself a priest, while a woman with a skill for speaking with nature spirits might call herself a druid. But in the end, as long as they studied the world as part of their profession, they were wizards.

And Jarvin had a tower for them. Used as a school and training ground, the Jarvin Tower’s stated mandate was to ‘teach, guide, and protect the world’. It was the place I most wanted to visit in fact. It could be seen from any point in the city. The magic of the wizard’s experiments had been used to make the tower as tall and large as possible, making it one of the most famed buildings in the world. There were legends that any magic used there never failed to work, thanks to the enchantments on the building. Combined with its position near the cities religious and government center, the Jarvin Tower was one of the most well visited places in the land.

Except when you’re a half-orc. If you are, you simply admire it in the distance, then shrug and go back to work.

Hasha didn’t work in the tower. He’d gotted special dispensation to work on his experiments on his own time. It was part of how he met me.

Even for a wizard, Hasha Nin was… odd. He’d come by one day to see me. Apparently he’d heard rumors of a half-orc child being raised in a blacksmiths house, and had come by from his laboratory a few blocks from the Jarvin Tower to come by. He’d been doing a paper on hybrids at the time, and I was the first orc one he’d ever had the chance to visit. He paid Arthur a great deal of money, and promised not to hurt me.

The tests he’d given me started with tests of my physical abilities, like how strong I was. Even as a ten year old child, I’d been capable of lifting fifty kilograms, something that Hasha had said was normal for orcs.

Then he went to my mental abilities. He taught me how to read, write, and do mathematics. He was surprised when I devoured the lessons. I don’t think he understood what they meant to me.

As a child, I was feared by everyone but Arthur and Jennifer. People saw my green skin and saw me as a future killer. I don’t hate them for their ignorance anymore, but it hurt deeply as a child. I tried to be nice and polite, being as calm as I could just to keep people from becoming enraged at my presence, even as resentment filled me.

Then came Hasha. He seemed truly interested in me, in what I could do. He wasn’t hateful, and he seemed to see my race as something to be celebrated, to be proud of. He taught me to stop hating myself.

And so I learned all he could teach me, until one day he started teaching me magic. And at some point, he just never stopped teaching me.

I wasn’t his apprentice, not officially. Jarvin Tower’s council wouldn’t have allowed it. But I sometimes thought of him that way, and I like to think he felt the same way.

------

“What is it now?” I said as I began putting my own apron on.

“You need to move this forge,” said Hasha. He pointed at the specific one, a large rectangular block of metal and stone with openings to put in coal and metal. “It’s right in the middle of the shop. If you move it closer to the exit, it will facilitate a sense of urgency. The closer to the door, the more you feel the need to get the next project out the door.”

“Damnit elf, is this your mind mumbo jumbo?” Art moved over pile of coal in the corner and started shoveling it around. It seemed like he was just keeping busy for now.

“It is the study of the way the mind works, and it is a very fascinating field!” Hasha declared. “Char, you’ll like this, it’s—”

Art picked up a dagger off a shelf, still keeping busy, and looked it over. Seeing him do that reminded me of my own dagger.

“Uh, Hasha?” I asked, cutting him off. He looked me full in the face. “The uh, the rune thurisaz, when combined with fire, it’s only supposed create a brief amount of electricity, right?”

The rune thurisaz, sometime written, þurisaz, was the rune for a directed force of destruction. It was designed like the letter P. Or the letter P was designed to look like it I suppose.

ᚦ

“Hm?” Hasha rubbed the spot between his eyes with two fingers, a habit he indulged at times. “Well, yes. We put it on that dagger of yours remember? It was only meant for brief shocks however, and we never combined it with more power runes.”

“Not enough to turn a man into charred meat then?”

Hasha and Art stared at me. I sighed, looking down at my hands. The light traced my dark green skin.

“Char? What happened?” Hasha asked worriedly.

“…Three men followed me on my way home,” I said softly. “One had family in Banfarse, so they wanted revenge. They tried to kill me, so I beat them.”

“Good,” said Art gruffly. His grip had tightened on the dagger in his hand, knuckles going white. “The city guard didn’t catch you, of course, so no way they’ll blame you.”

“Char?” asked Hasha. The wizard cocked his head. I looked him in the eyes.

“Jennifer… she had a problem with one of the men. And she killed him with my dagger. It exploded with electricity, and turned him into… into meat. The dagger didn’t have that much power, did it? Can the effect be replicated safely, or does it…” I shook my head when I realized what I was saying. “I must be a terrible person. A man dies and all I can wonder is how my weak rune could have done something like that.”

Hasha scuffed. “Well I have to applaud your magical curiosity. Besides. That man tried to kill my student for something that he wasn’t even alive for. I have no sympathy for him.”

“I didn’t want him to die.”

“And you didn’t kill him,” Art growled. For such a thin man, he could produce deep growls. “Jenny did.”

“Yeah but…”

What kind of monster doesn't care? I worried more about Jennifer than I did the man she’d killed. He’d been a mean little shit but he at least deserved the sympathy deserving of any normal human, right?

So why didn’t I give a damn? Why did I have so much concern about the fact I had no concern?

Hasha stared at me as my mind ran in circles before rising up and patting me on the back. “Hey. Let’s talk about something else,” he smiled up at me, then nodded at my back room. “How’s the prototype?”

“Still working on it,” I said.

“Show me what you have,” asked Hasha.

I nodded, leading him in. I ignored the fact that, considering both he and Art had been arguing in here before I came in, he’d probably already seen everything. I welcomed the distraction, and he knew it.

As we left, Art began filling one of the forges with charcoal, preparing to work through the rest of the day and into the night.

------

My room was also clean. This was because I simply couldn’t stand the idea of it being dirty. Dirty meant dangerous. I’d had that hammered into my skull a thousand time in my lessons. While Hasha may not have wanted to come off that way, that was how I took the rules of magic.

As such, my back room had three shelves on each side, all six built by me. I’d installed drawers into them, and painstakingly wrote the names of the objects kept inside. They held slivers of metal, plant samples, chemicals, a set of jeweler’s tools, and even a glass vial full of my own blood inscribed with the rune for ice, īsaz, to keep it from decaying. The rune was simple, just a single line, but it kept the sample at freezing temperatures.

ᛁ

Directly across from the door was my set of equipment. A few large tanks of gas, two with a sign warning of how flammable he gases within were, sat there, while a rack held the various hammers and chisels I used in my work, as well as several tools I’d created myself.

There were two more things in the room that were important. The first was the artifact I’d been working on for weeks, a project that could change my life. The second, was the armor.

It sat on a stand. It was massive, made to fit even my large bulk. The chest plate was a simple curved piece to deflect any bladed blows. The pauldrons were formed to fit my shoulders, the gauntlets segmented to let me move. The back had a large bulge with a hole at the bottom. The thighs and calves were covered as well. The boots, rather than being pointed like some I’d seen, were rounded off.

It was the work of many, many hours, taking massive sheets of metal and forming it to shape. I’d polished it to a bright silver, planishing the dents out, heat-treating it, and hammering it. I’d come with several new ways to strengthen metal, and ended up working out several ways to add carbon to the process, further strengthening it.

Hasha blinked at the sight of the armor, then walked over to look at the armor. He touched the fine metal weave underneath the armor. “This…how did you do this?”

Underneath the armor was the chainmail I’d developed. The one I’d made the chainmail with magic.

I have no real skill with magic, at least not in the sort that begs immediate results or adaptation in the moment. It take a lot for me to produce even the smallest effects. If I want to blast out a fireball, I’d need several hours to do so, and wouldn’t be able to produce much. Hasha, on the other hand, could probably destroy the whole building around us.

But the magic I was good at all had to deal with being patient, keeping calm and cool. Years of fighting the baser instincts of an Orc had made me an expert in the practice of meditation, and that was what I’d instilled in my magical specializations.

The chainmail was an example of that. It had originally been a cotton pieces of cloth. In my research, I’d studied transmutation, and found that many people disregarded it. The process of, for example, turning wood to gold required actual gold in the exact amount you wanted to make. You couldn’t simply give a wood chair the traits of gold without paying the exact amount as the weight of the object you were transmuting.

But then, I had a thought. The important part of the process wasn’t that the chair became gold. It was that gold took on the form of a chair.

“Based off that hypothesis,” I explained to Hasha as he took the thick weave between his hands. “I wondered if transmutation is not the changing of one material to another, but the changing of the properties of the material itself. A hybrid material. So I took an old cotton shirt, and a piece of steel, and focused on giving the shirt the same strength as the steel without sacrificing flexibility or increasing the weight. Then I did it on seven other shirts. SO I now chainmail that weighs as much as seven cotton shirts, has the same thin weave as such a shirt without the large holes others do, and… well.”

I waved at the chainmail.

“Hmm,” Hasha sighed. “I’ll have to see your calculations. You accounted for all the numbers?”

“I think so,” I replied. “Just in case, I made sure to spend as much time on my runes of strength as I did the actual transmutation of the cotton.”

“Good,” Hasha nodded firmly. “Even it does end up being as weak as simple cotton, that will do the job,” he looked over at me. “Did you consider using carbon rather than steel itself? Because if you remember what I taught you about the physical magic of materials…”

I nodded eagerly. “I’ve got new calculations for that. If I can get the carbon to form into a crystal lattice, similar to what diamonds have, layer it the way I do with the steel cotton, and make sure it all goes well, then the tensile strength will be massive.”

“And you’ll have the most powerful chainmail ever made,” Hasha finished. He laughed. “A bit dramatic, as statements go, but still. Brilliant! Of course, you’d have to deal with superconductivity, but a few runes to absorb electricity and deflect, and you’ll be fine,” he winced. “Well, theoretically. We’ll have to run tests,” Hasha smiled, for we both knew tests were some of the best parts of magic. Theory was good, but application was the real gem. He then looked over the armor again. “And the runes? How many have you put in? That are working in concert?”

Here I winced. Armor is, and always will be, the most expensive, time consuming thing to build for a blacksmith. I’d saved for over a year to get enough money to build the armor, to collect the iron and steel for myself. I’d done extra jobs at the docks for the money, taking on severe ridicule and doing heavy labor for the copper to buy the ingots and ore that I wanted. And since everything was made to fit me, I had to buy absolutely massive amounts of metal.

And in the end, the armor was a failure. At least for the purposes I’d created it.

“There are thirty-seven different runes through-out the armor,” Hasha’s eyes lit up with hope. “Three are working in concert on front of each boot, five in the chestplate, five in the back attachment, four on each pauldron, six in each gauntlet, and one at the neck.”

The hope in his eyes disappeared. He stared at me, shocked.

“Wha, but… thirty-seven!” Hasha shook his head, despairing. “What happened? You worked so hard!”

The disappointment in his voice made me want to scream in anger at myself. I calmed myself with the experience of long practice. “It was too dangerous. I had my set up correct, but I… I just couldn’t do it.”

“Damn it Char,” said Hasha in disappointment. “You’re too cautious. It’s a good trait, but if you keep holding yourself back—”

“I’d have thought not wanting to get blown up was a normal thing,” I said sarcastically. “Or is that just orcs?”

“Char,” He glared. “You know what I mean. You need to get over this irrational fear. You aren’t the best wizard, but you can certainly become an excellent runemaker. You just need to balance that cautious nature of yours with some spontaneity.”

I winced. He was right. I just couldn’t conceive of doing something so dangerous. Runes had to be carved with exact lines and dimensions. They acted as the channels and pools for mystical energy, guiding them. And connecting runes was even worse. You had to worry about the way the lines flowed, the confluence of each design, the eventual result… it was infuriatingly complex.

And then of course, a single screw-up could blow you up. Or freeze you. Or erase you from existence. (The last was more theoretical. After all, if someone was erased from existence, why would you here about them? They didn’t, and never had, existed.)

The highest I’d ever connected was six. The first level of grandmaster required ten. The armor was my first real attempt at reaching grandmaster level. Sure, I wouldn’t ever be able to claim the coveted amulet and the title given by the Jarvin Tower to all runic grandmasters, but I’d know it, and Hasha would know it. That had been enough for me to put in the time.

I’d made armor with Art a few times, and by making my own, I’d have plenty of surface area to do the job. I’d spent silver, real silver, on all of the materials for it. Not just metal, but the chemicals, plants, and rocks to truly incorporate magic into the armor.

Dozens of pages in my notebooks were dedicated to the project. Dozens of theories incorporated into the steel before us. All for nothing.

Damn it.

I quickly tried to get Hasha away from the subject. “Besides, I couldn’t afford the reagents to do the job safely. I have to wait until I can afford more. Nothing to do for now.”

Hasha brightened. “Oh, well if you need money—”

I shook my head quickly, now feeling guilty on top of the rest of my emotions. “No. I want to obtain grandmastery myself. If I’m going to do this, it will be on my own. I can accept the help for things like food, but for this… I want to do this myself.

He scoffed, folding his arms. “Rather prideful of you.”

All I could do was smile. “Maybe. But at the least, the armor works. It may not be at grandmaster level, but it’s still the best thing I’ve ever built.”

I meant it too. I’d put in everything I knew about physical and spiritual magic into the armor. It was my greatest work. At least for now.

I didn’t look over at the artifact I’d been building in the corner of the room.

Hasha smiled at the pride in my voice. We sat in comfortable silence, looking at my creation. After a moment, Hasha coughed. “I uh, won’t be able to come tomorrow.”

I frowned. “Right. The Prophesied Child.”

Hasha nodded.

The Prophesied Child was a relatively new legend in the city, only about twenty years old or so. Years ago, Turab had been struck by a plague. Called Undead Maker, it had caused the bodies organs to slowly shutdown one by one, leaving people to slowly die as their organs rotted inside them. The name was for the horrid rotting smell that arose from the infected.

A cure was eventually found thanks to several alchemists working with druids, who discovered the bacteria that was killing people had a very similar, but far less fatal, counterpart. They realized that people who had fought off the second disease were immune to the more lethal variant. Based on this, they created what they called ‘inoculations’, and saved many from the horrible disease.

But even so, thousands had died. Families had been torn apart. People started to despair.

And then the prophecy came. A girl would rise among the chaos. The girl who would save the land from the great evil that threatened it. It was all very vague and, well, prophetic. But in the wake of the Undead Maker plague, it was a breath of hope that people desperately clung onto. She’d been touted as the soon to be hero of Turab, raised in a chapel since as long as I could remember. When the Chapel of Valor, the religious center of Jarvin, wasn’t preaching about being good to your neighbors, they were signing praises of their messiah.

And yet, no one had ever seen her. Until tomorrow, when she would be debuting in the city square. I had to admit, I was curious. I’d never seen a hero before.

“I’ve been told I have to attend,” Hasha said distastefully. “And to wear the damn robes.”

I snorted in humor. Hasha hated the fact that the official uniform for Jarvin Tower’s wizards were robes. He tended to avoid the other wizards, as their methods and his differed, but what he hated most were the long, flowing robes. He preferred a simple shirt and trousers, with thick protective gear when necessary.

“Always trip over the damn things,” he growled, then mumbled a curse in elven. Of course, like all elven, it sounded beautiful, for all the savagery of the curse itself.

“I suppose I’ll stay in tomorrow,” I said rhetorically.

“Yes. Crowds like the one tomorrow might riot if they see an orc amongst them,” Hasha said bluntly. True though. Crowds in Jarvin didn’t get too insane, but if they felt I was some sort of random orc assassin, everyone from the bakers to the fishermen might tear me apart.

“Gods, but I hate prophecies,” Hasha groaned. “What is the point of an adventure where you know the outcome from the start?” said Hasha, not for the first time. “Might as well stay at home and reread a favorite book if I want to do something I already know the ending too. Prophecies are bullshit.”